Privateer's Commission -ch 6-

Marionette was breathing rather hard. He could tell she was experiencing a deep rush of fight of flight chemicals.

Realistically, he couldn’t see her ever having been in a fight before which meant this would be an extreme first time for her.

The ship that’d been chasing them swung wildly to one side and began firing in their direction. Several ballistic cannons that’d slid out of interior hard points of the ship.

All the rounds went wide, however.

The thermal bloom from the rocket was entirely from the rocket. There wasn’t anything on Ralph’s ship that would give them away.

Even the lock-on of the laser canon was based on passive sensors rather than anything active. There wasn’t much for the enemy to focus on

“Oh my goodness they’re firing at us!” squealed Marionette, flinching in her seat and twisting away from the display. She was facing him now and had hunched into herself.

Unexpectedly, Ralph found himself staring down her cleavage to the point he could see her rather flat stomach. Tearing his eyes away from his ships-mistress, and the thoughts that dwelt there, Ralph focused on the situation at hand.

The shots were going wide, but even then, there was the distinct possibility of it striking. He didn’t know what caliber or the speed they were traveling at, but it was possible they could punch through the armored panels of his ship.

Which meant he needed to end this now.

“It’s alright dear Lady Siren. I’ve only just taken you on board, how could I ever let harm befall such a beautiful woman?” Ralph said smoothly. He activated the laser cannon and set it to a five second burst.

Given the construction of the enemy vessel he wanted to try and put in a small hole in it’s hull. He didn’t think they’d have a rapid reaction to a sudden loss of pressure or even the tools to handle it.

Ralph genuinely believed these were fools after Marionette on an impulse.

A solid slug rocket wasn’t really needed and he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to refill his supply of rockets.

“I mean, you really are gorgeous, Marionette. Absolutely so,” Ralph continued, having noticed she was looking at him now. She needed a cool, calm, and collected captain at the moment. “I was sorely tempted to agree to your terms based on your smile alone, let alone what you were offering.

“I was just genuinely scared of the harm we could end up doing one another. Fear made my choice for me.

“In this matter though, I wouldn’t be afraid. I’ve been in much worse positions.”

He said the last and met her eyes, giving her a wide smile.

By the time he had looked back to the display, he watched the laser turn off.

It was venting atmosphere. Small trails of it were appearing and vanishing as it was rapidly pull apart into the void.

Moving the laser around Ralph fired another burst. Then a third.

The gas continued to vent rapidly and the AI was telling him that there was a decrease in the speed of the vessel due to it. It was no longer on the exact same trajectory.

There was also a lot of heat escaping with the atmosphere. All of that warm air being pulled out made the ship practically glow as it warmed the exterior of the craft.

It even gave Ralph a better idea of what he was firing at.

In rapid succession, he put six more holes into the cabin.

Though there hadn’t been a response to his shots since the third one. It felt as if they had given up, sealed themselves in a room, or were quite dead.

Ralph activated the harpoon that was on the back end of his ship and hidden by the cargo bay. It was a trick he’d learned from the Bloods.

They liked to hunt other ships and enjoyed using harpoons to pull them in close.

A laser cut out across the darkness of space and slammed into the Siren. Hitting not far off from where the laser cannon was.

Not even considering what had just happened, Ralph flicked several switches and inverted the ship with multiple maneuvering bursts.

Reorienting the ship and pushing it in a slow sideways crawl.

Now, the top of the ship was was facing the direction of the attacks and the enemy ship. If there had been any heat signatures from the strike, or his own cannon, it’d be obscured now.

Several more beams cut through space to where he’d just been.

Then a trio of rockets tore past. All of them shooting through the area Ralph was creeping out of.

“Ooooh, this is-I’m so scared,” Marionette moaned, trembling in her seat. “What happened?”

“Someone decided to get fucking tricky,” growled Ralph, setting off a few more maneuvering thrusters to stall out the sideways movement. He’d mostly put himself between where the shots came from and his original target. “Used that ship in front as bait and waited for us to reveal ourselves I suppose.

“At least, that’s what I think. It’s what I’d do. He lost his element of surprise now though and is now playing hide-and-seek with us.”

Marionette was once again nodding her head. All while gasping.

A trembling hand was held up to the monitor and she was quickly tapping at it. Likely trying to figure out what she was looking at.

She didn’t have access to anything that could screw them over so he just let her do as she wished.

“I can’t see them at all?” Marionette whispered.

“The big ships don’t care much about being seen,” Ralph explained as he let off two more thrusters. They rotated his weapons back into place now that they’d had a chance to radiate off whatever heat they had.

The active cooling systems would handle the rest.

“They have point defenses, interceptor rockets, whole lot of things. Us smaller ships, and the like, we all just act like naval submarines,” continued Ralph. “With materials and high end counter-measures, it really does become a game of hide-and-seek.”

Marionette grunted at that and chewed at her lip. She looked extremely out of place, but she was once again pushing onward.

Just as she’d done in the port.

Ralph felt that dual feeling of envy and admiration for her.

“I’m so nervous,” Marionette whispered. “I know I asked for something like this but I’m scared.”

Staring into the monitor, she continued to hunt.

Searching.

“I think you’re being pretty brave, pretty lady,” said Ralph. He cautiously began to use more thrusters to slow himself down a touch. He wanted to drift closer to the original enemy ship.

He had an idea but he wanted to be careful about it.

“Sure could have fooled me,” mumbled Marionette.

“Don’t argue with your captain. You’re beautiful, you’re brave. Also, this bacon is amazing,” complimented Ralph, having gnawed through the rest of his meal. “I can never get it crispy like this.”

Marionette laughed, her shoulders looked to loosen up a touch and she laughed a second time.

It looked like she wanted to say something, but she kept it in.

“We’re getting closer to the first ship we disabled. Their electromagnetic signals, heat, as well as presence, will give us some cover. So long as we shield ourselves behind them, rather than near them,” explained Ralph as he maneuvered them closer to the abandoned ship. In closing near to it he risked a thruster or two to keep a better pace with the ship. “We can casually monitor the readings and wait. The time frame for us being outside of sensor range isn’t forever. It’s only about another hour, give or take. They’ll need to make a move if they want your bounty. We’re in control of the pace.”

“Ahh! Yes, I get it! I-yes! Yes. That-that means I should be looking at… at… this,” Marionette declared and then gestured to her own screen.

Looking over at it, he saw that it was the readout for the trajectory of the original shots.

“They would be of course, thinking in a similar way to you. They would have shifted their location and are not where they were now. Right?” Marionette suggested. “They were smart enough to hide and wait, they would be wary enough to move. So I should look all over these places.”

Ralph grinned and gave a small nod. It wouldn’t really help at the moment but it’d keep her busy and doing something.

A number of lights on his panel went off in the next moment and he received several warnings. He was being painted with radar and lidar again.

From what he’d assumed was the disabled ship.

“Shit,” he whispered. He had no idea what the hell was going on, but the ship in front of him still didn’t show signs of life.

“It’s from the enemy… right? It’s… it’s this?” Marionette questioned, tapping at her monitor. “The readings aren’t right. It’s not the right strength for how close we are. They’re pinging the enemy ship trying to figure out what’s going on with it?”

“W-what?” Ralph stuttered.

“It’s… the readings from that are further away. It had a radio signal included in that sweep,” Marionette stated firmly and with confidence. “That wasn’t this ship. It’s the other one. They’re… they’re here.”

Marionette pointed at her screen.

As she’d been speaking, she’d been looking at the information the AI provided about the sensor sweep that’d just struck them.

Ralph didn’t really think she was right, but it sounded possible. Doubly so since she said her hobby had been dealing with communications. That meant she’d spent a lot of time sweeping the stars.

His hands had been hovering over the flight controls. He had been ready to boost them away from the ship and off to the side.

They were pacing fairly close to the other ship and were still creeping closer to it, but there wouldn’t be an impact anytime soon.

Letting his hand fall away from the controls he instead waited.

Even if he was wrong and the ship they were directly in front of was alive, their weaponry would more than likely not be enough to punch through his armor.

The other ship however was certainly more of a threat.

In other words, being wrong would still be the right choice.

“I’ll trust in my lady Siren,” spoke Ralph aloud as Marionette was quickly digging into the data the AI kept throwing at her.

“I-yes. You should. I’m-yes,” responded Marionette, tapping at the monitor repeatedly. “Your AI is much better than you think. You don’t use it well.”

Ralph frowned, nodded his head, and shrugged. That seemed likely.

Floating there in space, next to a dead enemy ship, as a woman built to defy beauty standards worked with his AI to figure out where their hunter was.

As Ralph stared at the monitor, he saw a flicker of a response from his passive sensors. The electromagnetic emissions shifted rapidly on the readout.

From directly in front of them, to shifting to the side.

To Ralph, this told him the enemy was close.

So close that he was genuinely unnerved.

The only time he’d gotten electromagnetic readings like this without being painted with active sensors was when he was up close to one.

“These readings make it seem like… he’s right there?” Marionette asked in a confused voice as she tapped at her screen even as Ralph slammed a hand down across his controls.

An entire line of maneuvering thrusters activated at the same time. Rocketing the ship around in position in a spiral. It would sweep the spot the readings were coming from with his weapons.

Fucking movement in space is so weird. You can spin in one direction while still traveling unrestricted in the other.

The rocket bay came around in almost less time than it took for Ralph to activate the rocket’s to fire. Staggering them in three stages as his finger slid down the buttons.

In rapid fire thirty rockets slammed out of their bay and blasted off.

All of the sensors, the cameras that provided him a view from outside, and anything that was trying to record data, more or less shut off.

Every feed went into zeros, null, or numbers that made no sense.

“Uhm?” Marionette tried, her voice sounding weak. “I don’t… are we… what… what?”

“Electromagnetic signal spiked. Unless you’re being pinged those don’t go up unless you’re right on someone,” hissed Ralph, watching as the Siren continued to spin. Though now she was drifting a bit off course. The repeated rockets launching at the same time had shifted her off the original course.

“I think that’s what I saw,” Marionette said and then looked to him with a wide eyed and terrified look. “Now… what?”

Ralph fed the AI a request to bring the ship to a holding pattern in line with the original ship they’d fired on while the sensors were still scattered.

With a number of thrusters going off in different directions, the spin of the Siren was quickly brought under control.

By the time that everything had leveled out, a lot of the sensors were coming back into line. Their numbers looking far normal.

Other than the fact that the thermal readings were off the scale for the area off to the side of where the original enemy had been.

The heat from the rockets impacting, exploding, and tearing apart the ship that it’d hit was still hanging about. It gave Ralph a great view of what he had just attack.

It was a corvette.

“It’s a warship. A small one, but a warship,” Ralph hissed, looking at the display. Given that the entire engine room had been blown out of it it was most certainly dead in the water.

Then his AI gave him a ping.

Looking to the display he saw something unexpected.

“It’s a House Ginil corvette serving in the House Defense forces,” Ralph read off and then sighed. “Well. They really didn’t want you to survive, Marionette.

“That or to bring you back for one reason or another. I’m willing to bet they tracked us from the Bazaar and this fellow.”

“Are… are they dead?” she asked.

“I mean, probably. If not, we’ll make them dead. We’ll just pound a harpoon into this guy. I think the AI said it was named Abel or something,” explained Ralph, gesturing at the ship they’d disabled first.“Then put one into that guy and hard burn in the opposite direction. It’ll slow them down enough that we can pick’em over.”

“What… about our cargo? Isn’t still… going?” Marionette asked.

“Oh yeah, it’s still going. We’ll just fill up our ship with everything we want and if we need to, just fill up Abel with whatever else. Then tow it with the harpoon. Just gotta nuke anything that’d have information on it and say we found it dead in space.

“Then burn off to find our cargo and load it all onto that after that.”

“We… we’re pirates,” Marionette whispered, turning to once again look at him with wide and quite pretty eyes. “I’m a pirate. I’m… on the run from the military. We blew up two ships.”

Ralph snorted at that, leaned back in his chair, and looked her over critically.

Once again the straps of the seat-belt were doing great things to her and made her look quite lovely.

“You’re one hell of a great looking pirate, then,” Ralph murmured in a complimentary way. “Though, we do need to talk about what to do about you. We have two options and you just shot to the top of ‘need to do’ list.”

“Oh? I’m not going to be going to bed alone and naked tonight?” Marionette asked and leaned back into her seat while also sitting up.

The action forcibly pulled her apron lower and Ralph could now most certainly see the darkened circles of her nipples peeking out the top of the apron now.

She had most certainly done it on purpose and was smiling at him.

He imagined her adrenaline was through the roof and she had a lot of chemicals buzzing about her head.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I’m kinda slow on that stuff. It’s not you I’m just… slow,” apologized Ralph. “But we do need to talk about you. We’ve got two options off the top of my head.

“I can claim you as cargo. Booty. That you were something I took as a prize in a dark-space battle. It’s not like you’d naysay me in that either so it’d just be accepted as is.”

Marionette’s eyebrows went up a that and her mouth shifted as she began to chew at the inside of her cheek.

“Then I’d just keep you like that until it was time to set you free from our original agreement,” Ralph continued. “That’d eliminate your bounty since you’re no longer a person or a citizen but… a thing.

“The other alternative is claim your bounty as a Privateer and that I’m keeping you. I can do that every now and then as a Privateer so long as the Confed officer I’m working through gets a decent bribe. Often half the bounty or fine. You’d likely be treated as cargo in that case, too, but not on paper.”

“I prefer the first one. Just claim me that way I’m officially on the books,” Marionette suggested. Then she hit him with another beautiful smile, her eyes brightening. “Does that mean we get to go loot those ships now? Am I officially your Lady? A privateer’s lady? I’m a crew-member?”

“You’re most certainly the Lady Smiling Siren, and most certainly a crew member,” agreed Ralph, knowing exactly what she was getting at. “You’ll of course get a share of the plunder as a crew-man. Though it does get reduced since you’re… well… my Lady.”

“Oooh! So exciting!” cheered Marionette gleefully, clapping her hands together and bouncing around a bit.

It caused her to spill out of her apron completely and fold the top of her apron down.

“Dear me, I’m just falling out. That’s just a bit much despite trying to keep your eyes on me.

“These are for later. Not right now. We’re going to be busy plundering, and this is just… just too much,” she murmured suddenly with another laugh, gently pushing her breasts back into her clothes and then adjusting her apron. “You can see about plundering your lady later, which I’m hopeful for.”

Ralph wasn’t going to argue about plundering her.

He suddenly found he really did want to do that and as soon as possible.

Pulling herself back into place where she was just -almost- falling out, instead of actually falling out. Then she met his eyes and gave him another smile.

“All that nonsense about it being boring,” she murmured in a teasing and mildly annoyed way, all while smiling at him. She even lifted one well manicured hand and made a dismissive motion at him. Her smile growing wider and her nose wrinkling. “It’s been rather exciting and terrifying so far. Far more so than acting and modeling.”

Ralph couldn’t argue that since she’d come aboard, everything had changed.